Дорин Тови: Cats In The Belfry

James thought himself no end of a dog when he was safely down though. He stalked around stiff-legged as an Arab, looking up at the tree and bellowing at everybody to see where he'd been, while Sugieh gazed at him with soft, big-eyed admiration. In return he stole one of Mrs Smith's fur gloves for Sugieh to play with, and taught her to dig holes in the garden.

A great step forward, that was. We had been trying for a long time to get Sugieh to dig in the garden instead of using an earth-box, but to no avail. Now, with her friend James to guide her, she suddenly caught on. Not, mind you, to what the holes were for; she would break off and rush indoors to her earth-box for that. Just that cats dug holes. For the remainder of the fortnight she and James dug holes so industriously all over the Smith's garden that by the time we came back from holiday the place looked like a battlefield.

The Smiths didn't mind, though. They were very long-suffering. As they said, people who keep Siamese have to be if they don't want to go mad.

FOUR

Trouble in the Valley

That summer our quiet country village resounded to a host of noises it had never known before; the loudest and most consistent of which were the shrieks of startled pheasants running for their lives and the clatter as the bottom fell out of Shorty's cage.

Why Sugieh had to chase pheasants when we lived practically next door to the gamekeeper we never knew, but it was typical of her. Anything for a sensation. She only had to hear the slightest rustle in the copse across the road and she was off like a shot, regardless of who might see her.

Once it happened when the Rector was with us in the garden, holding, with the Harvest Festival in view, a leisurely conversation about marrows. One moment Sugieh was sitting modestly at his side doing her best to look like a Sunday School teacher and the next all you could see of her was a small white rear disappearing battlewards into the undergrowth, fifty yards away.

Fortunately the Rector was short-sighted and a little deaf and so missed the alarming spectacle a few seconds later, when a dozen pheasants erupted precipitately out of a gorse patch and fled up the hill with Sugieh, hard behind them, whooping like a Red Indian. Even more fortunately he had gone home again before she returned and missed hearing what Charles called her when she came back pheasant-less, marched straight indoors and knocked Shorty off his hook.

People have different ways of working off temper. Small boys kick walls. Charles used to slam doors – until Blondin narrowly escaped becoming a Manx squirrel one morning when Charles was particularly mad with the Government. After that, since having to look both sides of a door and on top before slamming it rather spoilt the effect, he took up smoking. Sugieh's remedy for all her frustrations, from falling out of a tree through too much showing off to being clouted by Mimi for being cheeky, was to knock down Shorty.

We got wise to her in the end. When we saw her stumping down the path with her ears flat and her tail stiff as a starched poker we used to nip in and lock Shorty in the bathroom. Sometimes, however, we weren't on the spot when she got frustrated, and the first we knew about it was the crash, mingled with the frantic ringing of the budgie bell, as the cage came off its stand.

She never hurt Shorty. After the first couple of crashes Charles worked out mathematically where the cage would land and we kept an armchair permanently on the spot. But Shorty used to get awfully mad about it. When we rushed in to the rescue they were always in the same position. Sugieh on the arm of the chair with her nose against the bars, shouting all the things she dared not call Mimi, and Shorty – keeping carefully to the middle of the cage – bouncing up and down with rage and screaming back like a Hyde Park heckler.

The only damage she did, other than to our nerves, was to knock the cage so out of shape that eventually the bottom came off and had to be tied on, like the fire-guards, with string. It still fell off every time she hit the cage, but as the cage always landed right way up in the armchair Shorty came to no harm and always thoroughly enjoyed the sequel in which Sugieh, screaming wildly for Anna and the RSPCA, got her bottom smacked on the spot.

It wasn't, we discovered as the months went by, that Sugieh was particularly wicked. It was just that she was a Siamese. After a while we found we could recognise fellow Siamese owners almost at sight by their harassed expressions and the way they flinched at unexpected noises. All of them had hair-raising tales to tell of their experiences. There was Ho, for instance, who lived at the other end of the village and whose ambition seemed to be to get himself jailed for felony, with his mistress as an accessory after the fact. Ho just walked into other people's houses, stole anything he thought his owner would like, and took it home to her. His mistress, who was a pillar of the WI and terribly worried about the whole thing, spent anguished hours restoring to the rightful owners love-gifts which ranged from a pair of unwashed socks to a Victoria sandwich still in its box. Even she, however, was floored the time he came back with a brand new skein of yellow wool which nobody claimed and followed it up next morning with a complete knitted sleeve in the same colour. The mystery was only solved when on the third day he came in with the rest of the knitting still on the needles, and by following the trailing wool through two hedges, round a pond and up a lane (like all criminals he had made his one mistake and left the ball behind) she traced it back to a farmer whose wife was away for the weekend and hadn't missed it.

There was Basil, who – hag-ridden perhaps by his unfortunate name – went upstairs whenever visitors came and brought down the bath sponge. That may sound harmless enough, but the sight of a cat in a strange house eternally slinking round behind a bath sponge can be quite unnerving. At least two visitors, unused to the ways of Siamese, never went there again.

There was Heini, who persistently stole the golliwog belonging to the little girl next door even after his mistress bought him an identical one of his own. Heini, too, was so attached to a stair carpet which he had turned, after months of hard work, from Wilton into a remarkable imitation of Astrakhan that when his owner had the house converted into two flats, with her own new front door at the top of the stairs, he howled himself into a decline for two days until she had the door rebuilt at the bottom so that he could be with his beloved carpet.

There was – but why go on? Compared with other people's cats Sugieh was as innocent as a Botticelli angel; even if she had just swatted the heads off all the tulips in mistake for butterflies.

Charles said her trouble was surplus energy, and if we took her for walks she might work it off. She did to begin with. The first time we took her out across the hills she was so overcome that she walked three miles through this strange new wonderland with eyes as round as Alice's and never uttered a word. And when she got back she was so tired she fell asleep without even waiting for her supper.

Not for nothing, though, was her father's name Caesar. After a few trips she was the one who led us up the hills with her tail raised like a battle banner, and Charles – who had to rescue her from near-catastrophe practically every time we went out – was the one who sank into an armchair when we got home and reached for the brandy.

Again and again he had to climb trees after her. Not because she couldn't get down by herself, but because she liked being rescued from trees. It made her feel feminine.